Well, I could think of all kinds of things that could “allow ColdFusion to work yet not allow me to get the Administrator site to load”.

But I’d focus first on your comment about you getting the error that you (or someone) had disabled access to Java objects in the administrator. While that should not stop the CF Admin working, perhaps there are some combinations of things that can make that so (especially on CF8, which is old. And you don’t say if you applied any hotfixes, where perhaps this was addressed.)

So you’d want to first try to undo that. Of course, since you can’t get into the CF Admin, you can’t change it there. But that setting is controlled by an underlying XML file setting. It’s in the neo-runtime.xml file, as

<var name='disableServiceFactory'><boolean value='true'/>

which you’d want to change to false. The file in CF 8 is in [coldfusion8]\lib directory, or if you’re on the multiserver form of deployment, it’s deep inside the instance at [jrun]\servers\[instance]\[cfusionear]\[cfusionwar]\WEB-INF\cfusion\lib.

You would need to restart CF after changing this.

Note that it’s always risky changing these neo-*.xml files (which are what the CF admin changes to track its settings). Indeed, it would be wise for you to stop CF, then change this, and then restart it. And if CF doesn’t come up (and this is all that was changed), then change it back and it should come back up. (If you want to be really careful, save a copy of the file before you edit it.)

Let us know if resetting that helps.

/charlie